Book Review|Deep Chords: Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’

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Deep Chords: Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’

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CreditCreditYuko Shimizu

By Patti Smith

Aug. 5, 2014

A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy — the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. Within seven days of its midnight release, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” sold over one million copies in Japan. I envision readers queuing up at midnight outside Tokyo bookstores: the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant. I can’t help wondering what effect the book had on them, and what they were hoping for: the surreal, intra-dimensional side of Murakami or his more minimalist, realist side?

I had a vague premonition this book would be rooted in common human experience, less up my alley than the alien textures woven throughout “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Yet I also sensed strange notes forming, coiling within a small wound that would not heal. Whichever aspect of himself Murakami drew from in order to create “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” it lies somewhere among the stones of his mystical labors.

He sits at his desk and makes this story: a young man’s traumatic entrance into adulthood and the shadowy passages he must subsequently negotiate. His protagonist’s name, Tsukuru, means “to make,” a metaphor for the writer’s process. He is 36 years old and builds and refurbishes train stations, continuously observing how to improve them. He has the touching habit of sitting in them for hours, watching trains arrive and depart and the symphonic flow of people. His love of railway stations connects him with each stage of his life — from toys, to study, to action. It is the one bright spot in an existence he imagines is pallid.

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Haruki MurakamiCreditPool photograph by Jordi Bedmar

In a sense, Tsukuru is colorless by default. As a young man he belonged to a rare and harmonious group of friends wherein all but he had a family name corresponding to a color: Miss White, Miss Black, Mr. Red, Mr. Blue. He privately mourned this, sometimes feeling like a fifth leaf in a four-leaf clover. Yet they were as necessary to one another as the five fingers of a hand. As a sophomore in college, without explanation, he is suddenly and irrevocably banished from the group, cut off and left to drop into a murky abyss. Belonging nowhere, he becomes nothing.

Tsukuru Tazaki’s unfathomable anguish seems to contain every color of the rainbow. The colorless color of death. He pictures his heart stopping but does not take his life, as no method of suicide corresponds with his “pure and intense feelings” for death. He survives the terrible disaffection but carries profound invisible scars. Precise without, desperate within; plagued by graphic sexual dreams, aspects of astral projection, nameless guilt and confusion. A strange fellow even unto himself, tangled up and colorless.

Despite this torment he completes his education, becomes an engineer and builds and refines those railroad stations with an equal sense of romanticism and practical application. He leaves each more appealing, more efficient by his deft though subtle changes. Yet his self-regard is low; he does not seem to appreciate that his name and profession are beautifully in sync. Thankfully the universe sees him more clearly than he sees himself, as fate presents him with two guides on a wrenching yet revelatory journey.

The first, Haida, also has a color — his name means “gray field.” He and Tsukuru swim laps together in a college pool. Swimming is precious to both men, just as it was a saving grace for Toru Okada in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Haida enriches Tsukuru’s life, infusing it with imagination and physical energy. He draws him into the realm of classical music, striking a deep chord when he plays a recording of Liszt’s “Years of Pilgrimage.” A familiar passage in the first movement leads Tsukuru back to emotional memories of his four colorful friends. He envisions the ethereal Shiro (Miss White) at her piano and her delicate interpretation of the same piece. Kindled by the melancholy strains of “Le Mal du Pays,” he revisits his pain without turning his thoughts immediately toward death.

Haida recounts an extraordinary story about a dying pianist who sees the colors of auras surrounding every human. Tsukuru does not openly react. Instead, something hypersexual is awakened as he succumbs to the mysterious atmosphere of remembrance. In a “different sphere of reality,” one “imbued with all the qualities of a dream,” he has an intense sexual encounter with Miss White and Miss Black, somewhat orchestrated in this parallel dream state by Mr. Gray. Choked into awareness, he is finally able to connect with others and experience a physical release beyond swimming.

This friendship dissolves when Haida disappears — a further source of pain and self-evaluation for Tsukuru, who sadly wonders if he is “fated to always be alone,” nothing but an empty vessel for others to rest protectively within, then wordlessly fly away. Yet Haida serves an important purpose, filling Tsukuru’s postsuicidal days with companionship and shaking him out of his solitary torpor. He purposely leaves the three-record set of “Years of Pilgrimage” behind as a touchstone, a swirl of bittersweet memories connecting himself, Shiro and Tsukuru.

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Yuko Shimizu, whose illustration accompanies the review of Haruki Murakami’s novel “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” on the cover of the Book Review, explains her process.

A second guide, Tsukuru’s girlfriend Sara, has no color in her name, but she is definitely color-coordinated. When she prods him about his early life, Tsukuru hesitantly relays the scarring story of the loss of his four friends. She senses he will not be whole until he confronts the submerged questions of his past, which seem to be coursing toward the future. As wounds develop a protective crust, the soul flows dangerously beneath them. Sara sometimes seems more therapist than love interest, but he is deeply drawn to her. He expresses love, she fondness. But her driving curiosity spurs him to action. It is not the acuteness of suffering but desire that propels him. With Sara’s assistance he systematically finds his friends, located as close as his boyhood home of Nagoya and as far afield as Finland. To tackle the unresolved takes tremendous courage. He boldly seeks out each finger of the once harmonious hand, inadvertently unveiling its terrible secret.

On a first reading, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” seems kin to Murakami’s more minimalist novels “Sputnik Sweetheart” or “Norwegian Wood,” but it does not really fall into that category. Nor is it written with the energetic vibe of “Pinball, 1973” or in the multidimensional vein of his masterpiece, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Here and there realism is tinged with the parallel worlds of “1Q84,” particularly through dreams. The novel contains a fragility that can be found in “Kafka on the Shore,” with its infinite regard for music. Hardly a soul writes of the listening and playing of music with such insight and tenderness. We are given a soundtrack: Liszt’s “Le Mal du Pays,” from “Years of Pilgrimage.” A favored interpreter: Lazar Berman. A favored way to listen: vinyl on a turntable.

This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted, either by design or flawed in translation. Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another. “One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone,” Tsukuru comes to understand. “They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.” The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin. It is not “Blonde on Blonde,” it is “Blood on the Tracks.”

What will become of Tsukuru Tazaki? Will love fill an empty vessel? Will it form a prismatic heart? We can hold on to the possibility that Murakami will one day let us peer through the window of his extraordinarily interconnected mind to view Tsukuru’s continuing interior journey. But there are no guaranteed happy endings, no finite answers. There is a cold-case crime to consider, hovering death wishes, burdens that need to be cast and old garments unraveled. Stamina is required in the maintaining of hope, the desire to set it all down.

The writer sits at his desk and makes us a story. A story not knowing where it is going, not knowing itself to be magic. Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next.